Are you brave enough to stay in a bothy?
Bothy
Kat Hill
William Collins £16.99
Hikers love the idea of ‘getting away from it all’, but there are limits. Many walkers keen to explore even the most remote of Britain’s remaining wildernesses still like to end the day with a hot shower, a good, cooked dinner and a comfortable bed. A bothy offers none of those.
A bothy is a very basic hut used for shelter by those striking out into mountainous areas of the UK, particularly in Scotland. They’re free and they don’t have electricity, running water or a phone signal. You can’t book them – you just turn up and share the space with anybody else who happens to already be there. You’ll probably also be sharing the space with mice, and sitting in a fug of wood smoke and the pungent aroma of drying socks. They’re typically used by hardy, wild souls. If you take a keen interest in, say, the quality of shower gel in your Airbnb, a bothy probably isn’t for you.
Four years ago Kat Hill, a historian, was only vaguely aware of their existence. Then a friend invited her on a trip to one, and she was hooked. At the time, she was beginning to disentangle herself from a destructive relationship. She suffered from depression and self-harmed and seems to have experienced something close to a breakdown. So her discovery of bothies became intertwined with the recovery of her equilibrium and her decision to start again in her life. ‘In the small, enclosed comfort they provide, they gave me respite from more than the weather,’ she writes. She ended up leaving academia in order to write this absorbing book, in which each of the 12 chapters revolves around a visit to a specific bothy.
The result is thoughtful and thought-provoking, a beguiling combination of travel writing, nature writing, social history and personal reflection.
It includes meditations on environmentalism, rewilding and the ‘bothy movement’ – with its factions and feuds over the numbers of people using bothies, called ‘bothiers’, cannabis use and the proximity of toilet spots.
There’s also detail on the fascinating visitor books in bothies and the interwar explosion of hiking (then known as ‘knapsackery’).
I particularly enjoyed the snippets on bothy etiquette – the largely unwritten code that ‘bothiers’ are expected to observe. For example, it’s not the done thing to stay longer than a couple of nights. James McRory Smith, who occupied a bothy for 32 years, had definitely transgressed.
Naturally, the idea is to keep things simple. Use of an iPad in a bothy is frowned upon by hardliners. And it should go without saying that bothiers are expected to clear up.
Would the book have benefited from one last editorial tidy-up? Maybe. But the occasional repetition gives it a rough-around-the-edges feel, entirely in keeping with its subject matter. It certainly made me want to dust off the OS maps.